Much of the fuss over the My School website and league tables is based on a fear that parents will over-react to information that is only a very partial account of a school’s activities. As Pollytics blog reports today, Essential Research has started to explore parental reaction, though with only 242 people in the sample some caution is required.

Question: After seeing the information on your school or your children’s school, do you now have a higher or lower opinion of the school?

For clear majorities of both government (68%) and private (58%) parents, My School made no difference to their opinion. Almost identical proportions (16%/17%) said that they had a lower opinion as a result. However more private school parents (22%) than government school parents (15%) said that they had a higher opinion as a result of My School.

Of course a lower opinion doesn’t necessarily mean that parents will move their kids, but this survey suggests that My School will put some pressure on a modestly-sized minority of schools.

Associate Professor Craig Campbell has form for dubious use of ‘neoliberalism‘ as an explainer. Twelve months ago I took Campbell and his co-authors of School Choice to task for making a similar claim about the influence of ‘neoliberalism’ on schools policy.

My argument that private school policy has deep roots in Australian political and educational history, long predating ‘neoliberalism’, is supported by a new history of the state aid debate, Graeme Starr’s Variety and Choice: Good Schools for All Australians, published by the Menzies Research Centre.

Despite Starr’s title, his book suggests that neither variety nor choice were very important arguments in the revival of state aid to non-government schools in the 1960s. Rather two other arguments dominated the state aid debate, justice and need. Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Campbell said he agreed with commentators such as the academic Michael Pusey who have argued that the rise of neo-liberalism has contributed to undermining confidence in public institutions.

The middle classes now felt a need to insure themselves against failing government health and education systems.

From a SMH article on the My School website.

Within academia – with occasional spillovers into the Lodge – ‘neoliberalism’ has become an all-purpose trend explainer, some generally accepted broad change that is used to explain other changes. The evidence for all-purpose trend explainers is rarely better than circumstantial. Whenever I see an all-purpose trend explainer I turn my bull**** detector up several notches.

In this case, which is more likely: that people make greater use of private services because they have been influenced by an academic philosophy most people had never heard of until Kevin Rudd’s Monthly essay controversy, or that they make greater use of private services because government services are less appropriate or of lower quality than affluent people want? It takes ideological blindness to think that the former possibility is more likely than the latter.

From the Sunday Age this morning:

A Labor source said the reforms to boost the taxpayer-funded contribution were needed because political parties around the country ”are broke”.

”It’s being put in high-minded terms, but Labor federally is $8 million in debt, and Rudd refuses to fund-raise. State branches are also in a parlous state.”

Indeed. I fear that academic supporters of electoral law reform are being taken for a ride, providing ‘high-minded’ justifications for electoral law reforms that are, as they almost always are, grubby exercises in partisan self-interest.
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Also in the Sunday Age, Chris Berg emphasises that big government is the root cause of the political donations issue.

Julia Gillard wants to to increase the number of low SES students, and to improve their pass and retention rates. The government has now proposed a number of ‘equity’ policies to achieve these goals.

In this week’s Campus Review I argue (try here if the CR link does not work) that we could be headed for an unfair equity policy.

Part of the problem is that though the government is seeking to replace the current postcode-based measure of SES, probably with individual measures such as parental education, it is still talking about classifying the lowest 25% as ‘low SES’. What I show in the CR article, principally using NAPLAN results, is that lowest 25% is a highly arbitrary cut-off point. People above and below it have very similar (and not especially good) levels of academic performance.

This wouldn’t necessarily matter much, except for the fact that under the government’s policies individual benefits will attach to a low SES classification. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday almost everyone was condemning the South Australian government for requiring blog commenters to use their real names when offering their views on the South Australian election. Now the South Australian Attorney-General has backed down and says he will repeal the laws retrospectively.

I’m not convinced that the courts would have upheld any attempted blogger prosecutions as within the law. In what appears to be the relevant provision of the SA electoral legislation (s.116), the case would turn on the defintion of an internet ‘journal’. In the legislation, “journal means a newspaper, magazine or other periodical.” Is a blog a journal in that sense?

As with the similar kerfuffle over Stephen Conroy’s proposed internet filter, much of the criticism does not go far enough. In each case, the relevant ministers are trying to extend to the internet regulation that has long applied to other media. Is there something special about the internet that means different rules should apply? Read the rest of this entry »

This morning the major papers have their annual round-up of how much was donated to political parties and who the major donors were in 2008-09.

In my particular concern of political expenditure laws, as in previous years the papers were struggling to find any news other than how much money the unions spent, and this year so far as I can see only the SMH even bothered with that.

Of the $6.5 million in political expenditure declared in 2008-09 (down dramatically from the 2007-08 election year spending of $50.6 million) 94.6% was spent by unions, 3.6% by GetUp!, 1.5% by environmental groups, and the remaining $11,170 by the Aged Care Association (SA). Read the rest of this entry »

At the time of the second intergenerational report, I lamented the rapid increase in family payments. Fortunately the third intergenerational report shows that these have since stabilised.

Indeed, annual per person family payments (Family Tax Benefit, childcare, Baby Bonus/parental leave) are at $980 a year for 2009-10 only $10 higher than forecast for this financial year in 2007. FTB is slightly down (the means test on FTB B?) but childcare is up by 75%.

Rather optimistically, family payments are forecast to have slightly decreased by the end of this decade to $960 a year. I find this difficult to believe. For a start, there are already active plans to increase FTB handouts via overcompensation for the ETS. While the Coalition may be able to stall this for a while, their overall weak political position means that Senate obstruction has a use-by date. Read the rest of this entry »

As the GFC took hold in late 2008, some people were predicting a trend back to government schools. ‘Parents abandon private schools as downturn bites’ said a SMH headline.

I was sceptical, predicting a moderation in the trend to private schools rather than a reversal of the trend. In my view, religious diversity, discipline issues, growing affluence, and increased long-term importance of education will all, other things being equal, continue to favour private schools for the foreseeable future. Cyclical events like recessions may temporarily affect the affluence factor, but will not change the basic trend.

The preliminary 2009 schools data, released today, supports my scepticism about a trend back to government schools. Despite a small economic downturn, Catholic schools grew at more than twice the rate of government schools, and independent schools grew at around 5 times the rate of government schools.

Overall, private schools gained .24% of market share. Consistent with my prediction of a moderation rather than a reversal this is below the long-term trend. The annual average private school market share gain was .39% during the Howard years.

The Grattan Institute has released its first report, an analysis of student progress measures by Ben Jensen. It argues that ‘value-added’ measures – that is, how much students improve between NAPLAN tests – are a more useful way of assessing a school’s performance than simply looking at its absolute results.

The report meets Grattan’s claims to be ‘objective, evidence-driven and non-aligned’. It is well-researched, uses data, and presents ideas that could easily be adopted by either major political party. While the media played up its differences with the about-to-be-launched My School website, it’s hard to imagine that Julia Gillard would have any fundamental objection to the ideas presented. And that was pretty much how she handled it today:

From what I’ve seen of the reports of the Grattan Institute work, they are saying that this is a good start but they are wanting to see more. Of course we are going to keep building on this website year by year as we get more results from national testing, more results on Year 12 retention, more results on vocational education and training pathways and attendance at school.

Read the rest of this entry »